A Taste Of The Good Life? Wine Drinkers Say `Oui'

Suggested Medicinal Link Boosts Red Wine Sales

After years of flesh-mortifying athletic pursuits and unsatisfying butter substitutes, here is a health trend Americans can live with: Red wine.

Vive la France!

But, sacrebleu, what if it's all a canard?

Morley Safer and the CBS News "60 Minutes" team gave new meaning to the venerable French toast "a votre sante" (to your health) in a Nov. 17 segment that explored possible explanations for the low death rate from heart disease in France (less than half the U.S. rate) despite a very high rate of butter, cheese, foie gras and bearnaise sauce in the French diet.

Safer and his interviewees covered a host of possible explanations -- from the active French lifestyle to their carefully prepared, casually eaten repasts full of fresh ingredients. But many of the 30 million U.S. viewers of "60 Minutes" seem to have latched onto the unproven theory that red wine has anti-clotting properties that help ward off heart attacks.

Certainly, local "60 Minutes" fans appear to have taken this to heart.

Peter Johnson, wine manager at Rogers Fine Liquors in West Hartford, said that the Monday following the program, red wine sales were way up.

"It was incredible, the response." But nearly a week later, the vin rouge was still moving off the shelves. "Saturday, you could hear people talking about it," he said this week. "I'm looking at what I have to reorder based on Saturday sales alone, and the majority of it is red wine."

Martin Robbins Pianka, owner of Hartford's Spiritus Wine Shop, said the response has been surprising.

"A couple came in on Friday night, maybe 70 to 75 years old, and they said they're not wine drinkers but were health-conscious, and they wanted to try drinking a couple of glasses of red wine a day," said Pianka.

Many restaurateurs said the program has excited both conversation and imbibing. "I had to call this morning to order four cases," said Brown Thomson & Co. manager Robin Bojorquez.

"We've had people in here who, you can tell, have never had a glass of red wine in their lives, and they're drinking it now. It's really noticeable, especially at lunch time. Business people who normally had their Perriers were out there with their little glass of red wine."

So that's it? French red table wine is the Gatorade of the '90s?

Mais non.

Although the transcript of the program reveals that Safer chose his words carefully and never made extravagant claims for the theories he presented, the American Heart Assocation felt -- and issued a statement saying -- that "60 Minutes" had represented opinions and small, isolated studies as explanations for the lower incidence of heart attacks in France.

"I think the feeling was that they didn't support the conclusions they came up with," said Sue Gebo, a West Hartford nutritionist who acts as a local spokeswoman for the heart association. Even Dr. R. Curtis Ellison, a professor of medicine and public health at Boston University -- who was featured on the "60 Minutes" segment and was largely pleased with it -- seemed eager to reiterate that the program was a brief exploration of theories, not scientific truths.

So before you replace your morning OJ with a tumbler of Beaujolais, consider the following:

Fat intake -- Ellison said "60 Minutes" erred when it said the French eat 30 percent more fat than Americans do. The fat intake, he said, is about the same. The so-called "French paradox" is: Why don't they have the same proportion of heart disease? The American Heart Association statement observes that since 1968, the U.S. death rate from heart disease has dropped 39 percent, while the French rate has dropped only 6 percent. Still, the U.S. rate is more than twice the French rate.

Alcohol -- The regular ingestion of small amounts of alcohol has been shown to reduce the risk of coronary artery disease. This has been shown in so many studies, it's not particularly controversial. "The problem," Gebo said, "is the potential for abuse."

"It must be recognized that alcohol is a drug, and it would be improper to take alcohol with the thought that you are preventing heart disease, because alcohol does have the potential for getting out of hand and being injurious to the individual's health picture," said Dr. Lawrence S. Cohen, a professor of cardiology at Yale School of Medicine and acting deputy dean of the medical school.

Ellison said that for those who aren't driving, or pregnant or alcoholic, a small amount of alcohol is probably not a bad idea. The heart association, warning against heavy alcohol use, recommends that consumption not exceed two drinks (1 ounce of ethyl alcohol per day). A drink is 12 ounces of beer, 6 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor.